


Lemonade

by inanatticinnovember



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 1950s, Drug Use, Gore, I hate myself, M/M, Murder AU, San Francisco, and lots of on the road vibes, and symbolism, dont forget the fact that evERYTHING is fucking pink, drug use out the ASS, its like symbolism vomit in your eyeballs sorry not sorry, like okay its basically the beat poets if they killed people, not to mention too many literary references, think kill your darlings accept they kill more than just kamerer yknow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 20:26:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3302369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inanatticinnovember/pseuds/inanatticinnovember
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 1957 and Mickey Milkovich runs a Laundromat. Well, a little more than a Laundromat.<br/>It’s 1957 and Ian Gallagher is a criminal. Well, a little more than a criminal.<br/>It’s 1957 and when life gives you lemons? Well you don't make fucking lemonade.<br/>-<br/>Or the one where a Class-A Misdemeanor and a High Profile Felony get together and dig themselves huge fucking holes in the ground with cars, drugs, guns, and money.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Call of the Wild

_San Francisco, 1957_

There was a time in Mickey’s life when he wasn’t on the run and his mama used to make fresh lemonade.

She would sing Edith Piath while the lemon flesh rained juice into a pitcher with faded butterflies printed on the side. Light would cast over the squares on the floor and the knife would make an effervescent chop chop chop while she sliced citrus in half, bilateral incisions to their heavenly lemon bodies.

There was a small painting of a bluebird next to the clock. Daisies were always on the windowsill in a crystal vase that would cast star clusters on the wall if the light from the window hit it right.

Things were transparent, quiet. Simple. Streetcars weren’t named Desire. There wasn’t a pistol shoved down his pants. His sister stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and didn’t know what the word ‘father’ meant when she braided flowers into her hair.

His mother had real pink in her cheeks that made it look like roses could sprout from her skin.

“When life gives you lemons?” She would say.

You don’t make fucking lemonade. You slice your finger and scream at the sting.

 

* * *

 

A fly lands on the television screen and the light flickers serenely over it’s one million eyes.

“Forbidden Alcatraz Prison, from which no man has ever been able to escape, has it’s name for impregnability at stake as a daring break for freedom by the famed ‘youngest convict to ever step foot on the island’ triggers a man hunt over the San Francisco area and surrounding waters. To satisfy the curiosity aroused that would strain the credibility of any melodrama, reporters get the detail from Warden Owen Blackwell and the Assistant Director of Prisons Fred Wilkinson. The Warden says the unfortunate aid of one officer’s young daughter allowed the convict to make his way out along with a stolen boat. The convict is--”

“Turn that shit off, Ricky--that cube’s voice is gonna drill the brains out of your head.”

The knob on the television sitting in the corner is turned slightly to the right. Mr. fucking Magoo toddles across the screen. Ricky makes a kiddie noise and finishes folding Mrs. Benson’s silk bloomers, looking up at the screen as he picks each clothing item out of the basket.

The bubblegum pink walls look like a fresh bottle of pepto-bismol. The fly lands on one of the Arm & Hammer bins. The clock ticks breathlessly. One of the washing machines starts to throw a tantrum as a woman drops a nickel into the slot that says ‘Only Five Cents!’ and quietly complains about the raise in prices under her lipstick breath.

Mickey places one last towel into his basket and picks it up by the plastic handles. He feels light headed. A cup of coffee sounds really fucking good right now.

“Ricky. _Ricky_. Hey dumbass!”

The woman tsks as Ricky spins around, befuddled. He’s dumb as a rock but he’s happy and he’s built like a garbage truck. He smiles sunshine. Mickey’s not in love with him. Mickey’s not in love with anybody.

“Meet me out in the back when you’re finished, alright?”

“You got it,” Ricky says, smiling bright and turning back to folding neat mountains of undershirts and floral frocks.

Mickey shoulders open the door to the back office, carrying his basket. The clothing makes it’s way into canvas bags. Mickey straightens his navy blue uniform shirt, the cotton shifting as he picks up the bags and carries them out to the back street behind the building. The ground seems to quiver under the California heat. The asphalt might melt the soles-- _souls_ \--of his shoes. The truck is waiting on the curb, _Milkovich Dry Cleaning_ printed on the side in disgusting pink letters. Mickey gets the back doors open and throws the bags inside.

He sits himself on the edge of the truck to wait, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, the smoke spinning in the heat in front of his face. It makes him sweat. Five minutes and Ricky comes sauntering out the back door, one dark hand shoved in his pocket, the other with a laundry bag over his shoulder.

He smiles.

They fuck, quick and sweaty in the back of the van with one of the doors half open. Mickey doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. The heat makes him dizzy. Ricky’s hands on his hips make it hard to think.

Someone is arguing a few streets over as they pull their pants up. Ricky says something about getting the rest of the laundry and disappears into the building again. Mickey climbs back into the truck and starts stacking the bags up.

He doesn’t look when a car pulls into the lot behind him. The engine purrs, a door slams, Mickey pushes a bag further into the truck bed. It smells like laundry detergent and gasoline, sterile and sweet.

“Excuse me.”

Mickey pauses, his hand on the bag. He can feel the weight of the pistol shoved into his Hanes waistband, warm metal pressing against his protruding hip bone, connected to his skeleton like a third arm. It’s almost like the gun is filled with intricate blood vessels and covered in skin, breathing quietly against his thigh.

“What?” Mickey says, swiping his arm over his dry mouth and turning around to jump out of the truck. A man stands on the sidewalk. His face says eighteen years old but his demeanor says it doesn’t matter.  His orange hair is greasy and the dark circles under his eyes resemble moon craters but his suit is sharp--gray, pin striped, and waistcoated with a flat ironed maroon tie sitting neatly between the lapels. His shoes are shined.

“I’ve been told you do good business here, any chance I can talk to you for a moment?” His words are like the news man on the television but his voice sounds gutted and painful. He’s just spitting out vocabulary he collects from the paper, cutting up the sentences and rearranging them to make sensical responses.

“We’re talkin’ right now.” Mickey pushes up his sleeves so they bunch at the elbow.

“Right,” the man says and steps forward, feigning spooked deer but Mickey feels a shark under his tie clip. Mickey’s back muscles tighten. “A friend of mine--”

“--what friend?”

“A friend of mine told me--”

“Do I know you, asshole?”

The man stops dead; angry. He looks like a wild animal. He looks like he’s dangerous. But only for a second. Then he’s calm and contained and quiet. Mickey doesn’t know what to do with himself, who the fuck this guy is, why he’s here. He wants to have another quick fuck, pants down in the back of the unairconditioned truck with Ricky and then deliver, not stand here baking in the sun like a cracked egg on the sidewalk.

“ _A friend of mine_ told me the address. Now, I’m not here for your laundry services.” His eyes suddenly seem bottomlessly knowing like Prometheus and his lips turn up at the corners only slightly, forming small half moons at the corners of his mouth. It makes Mickey uncomfortable.

Mickey lifts his chin and he’s glad he’s standing between this square and the canvas bags in the truck. At the bottom of each bag are smaller bags, paper ones, wrapped around plastic bags, filled with white snowy powder. Only this is the summer of San Francisco and the ground isn’t cold enough for snow.

“All I got is some Bennies. The good stuffs not for sale--we only do special orders ahead of time,” Mickey says, wishing he had a tie to fix and that it would make him look just as intimidating as the man standing in front of him does.

Somewhere someone is playing Frank Sinatra.

“The Benzedrine is fine.” The man pulls out a few dollars from his pocket and hands them to Mickey with disgusting charm, teeth bared in a pretty porcelain grin. His hand is smooth and clean save for dirt underneath his thumb.

Mickey counts and pockets the cash. He digs out four Benzedrine tubes, tiny human rockets, leaving them in the man’s out stretched hand.

The man smiles this otherworldly smile, dropping the tubes into his pocket.

“I can get the ‘good stuff’ delivered then?” The words naturally roll off his tongue but sound foreign in his mouth. He quickly describes the motel he’s staying at down the street.

Mickey has pulled the cigarettes out of his front pocket.

“Can’t bring you nothin’ if I don’t have laundry to deliver.”

They look at eachother for a moment as Mickey places the cigarette between his lips. The sun is in his eyes and he has to squint.

The man deftly unbuttons and removes his jacket. He pushes it roughly against Mickey’s chest.

“Now you do.”

“Gonna have to pay for that.”

He produces several more dollars without a second thought. A Saturn ring of purple bruising spots his wrist. Mickey doesn’t mention it.

“Thank you,” the man says, quickly reminding Mickey of the address before he’s smiling again and sauntering back to his car. Mickey stares dumbly, feeling his skin crawl and his back ache like his spine is going to give out. He has this unignorable urge to move forward, to follow the man in his wake. Mickey’s never met a king, but if he had, they would’ve looked just like that.

“Hey! Who am I deliverin’ this to?”

The man turns briskly in one fluid, languid movement. He’s still smiling.

“To a Mr. Gallagher,” he says before he ducks into his car and slips away.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm going to TRY and post every week or so. Let's see how that goes.
> 
> Oh also, to any of you who are sticklers about Ian being in character: he's going to be more Sal Paradise meets Jay Gatsby meets Hannibal Lecter than Ian Gallagher in this one. You've been warned.
> 
> mickeyslegs.tumblr.com


	2. Gatsby and Caulfield

It’s dark out.

Sometimes, at night, San Francisco seems like a creature. One big, glowing, breathing organism. Golden Gate Bridge is the spinal cord. The bay and the ocean are the lungs breathing salt wind and sea foam phlegm. Fillmore is the heart and the rows of streets are the billions of brilliant capillaries, pumping blood cells of street cars, street cars, street cars.

Mickey feels very small and very large all at once.

He flicks his cigarette in front of Golden State Motel. It’s neon sign sports a half lit palm tree that gently buzzes, whispering softly about the murders happening in each glove compartment sized hotel room.

Mickey carries the dry cleaning bag with Mr. Gallagher’s jacket to the door on the very end. The numbering is brass made to look like gold; room 225. The lamp inside casts surreal shadows on the sheer curtains. He knocks.

The shadows move and a woman laughs, high and sweet. The door opens. Mr. Gallagher is standing there, just so, his head in front of the lamp, the penumbra of light around his face making him look like Jesus Christ.

He looks exactly as he had three days ago, a carbon copy, his hair slicked, dressed in the same gray slacks, the same white shirt, the same maroon tie. The only thing missing is his tie clip. He is a holy shark in a suit, somehow synchronously beautiful and stunning and regal and dangerous all together and all at once.

“House keeping,” Mickey says flatly, holding up the jacket.

Gallagher’s lips curl up mildly, like someone drew a smile on him in face paint. Mickey thinks he sees carnival lights in his eyes. Gallagher pulls the door open wider and says “come in, come in”, stepping deeper inside, out of the doorway.

Mickey doesn’t even think to object. The motel room is like a black hole, sucking him in.

It’s small. The carpet is a blush pink with ominous could-be-water, could-be-not stains littering it like bruises. The walls are cheap floral paper, fading and peeling at the edges. There is one bed in the center, unmade, the powder blue quilt spilling onto the floor. A woman lies on top of it. But she’s really only a girl in a silk robe, looking sultry and terrified all at once.

The room smells like lemon carpet cleaner.

“Michael--”

“Mickey.”

“Mickey. This is Miss Karen Jackson,” Gallagher says, moving to rifle through the beech wood bureau.

“Hullo Mickey, _I’m_ Karen Jackson,” she mumbles with a little wave and a tremendous trombone giggle, her leg stretching out, and she’s drunk. There are empty amber beer bottles on the floor.

Mickey gives her a shrug of greeting as Gallagher pulls several things out of the drawer; thin rubber tubing, a spoon, a lighter, something wrapped in a napkin.

A copy of a book called _On The Road_ lies on the bedside table with it’s cover ripped out and tucked inside the pages like a bookmark.

“Where’s my payment?” Mickey says, looking up at Gallagher, still carrying the dry cleaning. He hangs onto his anger like falling tightrope walker, hoping it will keep him above the waterline between coherency and blindly following the lost profit that is the man before him.

“In a minute, in a minute.” And Gallagher is pulling the bag out of Mickey’s hands, Mickey’s fingers somehow not working. The scent of meat and aftershave makes him dizzy and so do Gallagher’s forearms. He feels himself sinking.

Gallagher shucks the plastic skin from the jacket and rifles in the pockets, pulling out the resealable bag of heroin. Karen giggles, writhing about on the bed like Medusa, her toes curling, her Goldilocks’ ringlets matted haplessly. She sits up and crawls on all fours to where Gallagher is holding out the plastic tubing. He ties a pretty bow around her upper arm. She smiles lipgloss.

Mickey’s sunburn stings as he watches Gallagher melt powder on spoon, pull needle out of napkin, and draw bubbling liquid gold into plastic cylinder. All of them stare, mesmerized, like the needle is the prettiest little doll in the room.

Only Karen Jackson is the prettiest and she holds her hand out impatiently. Mickey watches the skin on her inner arm pucker, watches the needle slide into her gossamer epidermis, watches the gold disappear into her eager veins. She falls back on the bed with a little gasp, closing her eyes, her lashes stuttering. An angel down.

It seems as though it’s only Mickey and Mr. Gallagher left in the room.

“I ain’t gonna go around calling you Mr. fucking Gallagher this whole time,” Mickey says bitterly, his arms crossed as he leans against the wallpaper. He feels heavy, like he’s forged from iron. Gallagher glances up at him.

“My first name is irrelevant,” he says and Mickey doesn’t think Gallagher knows what the word irrelevant means.

“Alrighty then,” he mumbles, pushing off the wall impatiently. “Come on, gimme the bread before you shoot up.”

“You don’t want to join us?”

“You think I do my own shit?” Mickey asks incredulously, squinting at the ocean of a man in front of him. The bright colors and geometry surrounding them somehow make it easier to focus.

“It’s just a little heroin.”

Gallagher smiles. He says it like he owns the world. Like heroin couldn’t dig him a deep hole in the ground to die in.

And for some reason the look on his face, the way he moves like the king of the jungle--Mickey feels like nothing can hurt either of them. Like they’re both made from the gasses in Jupiter’s atmosphere and not delicate cells built up like skyscrapers to commit suicide off of.

Mickey would agree to do anything with this man and he’d only met him three days ago.

Somehow Mickey ends up sitting on the desk chair, Gallagher wrapping the tubing around his upper arm tightly. He traces the blue vein highways on Mickey’s skin, pressing his thumb hard into the place he’s going to put the needle. It’s the same one that he used on Karen Jackson, who is now lying breathlessly on the bed, but Mickey doesn’t care all that much, chewing hard on the inside of his cheek as Gallagher sinks the needle into his flesh.

There is a moment of anxiety, his heart drumming in his ears. And then everything just feels…

...good.

It feels _good._

He looks at the carpet and it feels like he’s floating on a pink ocean of stomach medicine. He looks at the ceiling and it looks like it’s made of milky stardust, like he could reach up and escape into the atmosphere. He looks at Gallagher and he thinks he’s in love.

It’s like they’re bobbing around in the Eagle Nebula, stellar parallax fingers gripping at his soul.

“Jazz.” A screaming whisper.

_Jazz._

Hopping bumping jiving jazz, melodious harmonics to his ears and he watches as Gallagher stands up, pulling Miss Karen Jackson off the bed, the two of them spinning lazily (heart wrenchingly) and suddenly a hand is in Mickey’s face, fingers waving. Mickey takes it, is pulled to his feet and they’re running a million miles a minute, out of the yellow hotel room and towards Gallagher’s car. It’s a beast, sitting there like a breathing giant, skewed sideways between the two white lines of parking space teeth. They all pile in, Gallagher behind the wheel, Karen laying out in the backseat and Mickey sitting in the passenger side, his hands on the glove compartment, watching as Golden State Motel slips out of view.

Gallagher has the radio on, Sinatra floating up through static electronic limbo. Gallagher beats the steering wheel and swerves, Karen Jackson is yelling _“Come fly with me! Fly, fly away!”_ at the top of her lungs as her legs go on for miles across the leather seat and Gallagher is chanting _“This is IT! This is IT!”_ None of it makes any sense but it’s crystal clear anyway.

Halfway to the jazz club Gallagher starts spouting proverbial bull shit about oblivion.

“There’s this sense of nothingness, y’know, and you’re here, and it’s there, and it just stretches out, far, far, far, like this beautiful fucking ocean and all that, and these things, they’re crazy, they’re _crazy_ , lemme tell you how crazy they are--you can stand up on the highest ridge or the highest mountain and guess what, if you fall off you’re still gonna die! It _feels_ like you can fucking jump off and do anything, fall into a bowl of chow mein, but that’s not the case now is it? No, you splatter all over the place like a human firework! GADOOSH!!--” he says this part with his hands in the air, springing out from his head in an exploding motion. “--and little bits of you go everywhere! And that’s the nature of relativity, and all that jazz. The whole idea of being a _part_ of a _whole_ \--you’re a god and then you _die_ and you’re everyone all over again!”

And Karen Jackson is going “yessir, yessir, mama wants a brand new bag, yessir” with her eyes closed like she’s praying. Mickey doesn’t know what to do with himself except watch it all happen.

When they arrive at the Jazz club, things seem significantly less grand, but Gallagher is dragging them by the collars, flinging them inside. It’s hot and stuffy and Mickey feels like he’s in the belly of a great white whale. The members of the band are just finishing up a song, everyone in the room getting real quiet in anticipation for the next one. They stand in the back, Karen looking like she’s going to pass out, Gallagher’s eyes two shiny dimes like the sun. No one wants to think about what’s going to happen when the sun comes up or when they get back to the hotel or even ten minutes from now. The sole focus is on the men standing at the front of the stage, their big hands on their saxes and their basses and their microphones.

One man starts the first note and another flies on right with him, dancing with his instrument like it’s ballet. They get going real good, start sounding like they’re made up of fifty people rather than five, and Gallagher is jumping up and down like he’s standing on hot coals, like the music is reaching out and grabbing his legs and making him dance like the mother loving devil.

And then a woman appears from nowhere, someone faceless pushing her out onto the stage. She’s got a presence to her; Mickey and everyone else in the room feel like moths and she is the lantern. And then she opens her mouth.

It’s like birds start flying out, little zooming blue jays and fat ravens that sword fight in the muggy air. Every face turns to her, every mouth opens in awe, and Gallagher is staring intensely, his whole body wiggling like a worm.

“She’s got I _T,_ ” he whispers; he’s frozen, and Mickey is frozen too. The hairs on the back of Mickey’s neck stand up and he doesn’t feel right.

There are two beats where everything has stopped, glasses in midair, fingers raised above piano keys, two people in mid kiss in a dark corner of the bar, light catching off a gold ring. And Gallagher’s eyes. There’s something in his eyes that Mickey doesn’t know if he’s allowed to see. Something so great, so big it could end the whole goddamned world.

And motion begins again…

They’re Nick Carraway in the apartment. They’re dancing. They don’t know what they’re doing but who the fuck cares. Who the fuck cares, take the care away and you hurt yourself, but _who cares?_

Something about a fight, bloody knuckles and yelling, screaming, but Mickey has knocked back too many drinks and the whole bar swims like a fish tank. The cool air on his face. An inhuman noise, a scream, a shot in the gray dark space between the street and the alley where empty bottles and missing persons fliers mark the finish line.

Red and yellow and green lights passing outside the window and shifting surrealist paintings over his face like a rorschach test designed by a Salvador Dali. Quietness and the scent of lemons and soft leather car seat beneath his cold cheek.

And then nothing but the heavenly sound of Billie Holiday on the radio. She sounds like his mother.

***

The room is warm.

Things move in spectral red behind his eyelids.

It feels like someone’s mother has placed a blanket of hot air around his shoulders. He’s weighted, pushed down into the mattress below him like a circus elephant is sitting on his chest. A fan shifts the air, drying the sweat on his forehead. He feels like he’s made up of ten thousand insects wrapped up in a chrysalis, feels like the sahara desert; he feels dead.

The room is a dark amber when he gets his eyes open. The fan above him spins lazily. Sticky light squeezes in through the thin yellow curtains, painting everything the color of molasses. Shadows have grown deeper. It smells like cigarette ashes and a thin string of dust floats in front of the window.

Karen Jackson is lying on the couch, curled in a tight ball like a frightened animal. She reminds him of a pill bug, the plains of her back a shell rolled up around her soft belly and ashen mousy face. He blinks at the yellow blisters on her feet before sitting up.

Things are thrown carelessly about the room. The lamp is tipped over. Mickey can’t remember anything except the needle in his arm and the glasses of golden fire he’d burnt his throat out with. He rubs his face and pulls his hands away at the smell of iron. They stare back at him as if eyes were set in his palms.

Dried to his skin like patchy poppy fields is what looks to be blood.

Mickey stumbles to his feet, leaving the half made sea of moth hole sheets and dead skin blankets behind him as he pushes through the bathroom door, flipping the light switch erratically, the bulb flickering reluctantly to life.

He breathes a deep, heavy sigh of relief.

The dull ache in his face is apparent now. Blood is dried and flaking under his nose and around his mouth, patching across his chin and down his neck, his shirt collar stained.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mumbles, leaning forward over the cheap plastic counter to assess damage before he’s pushing out of the bathroom door and looking for his things, trying to wrap his head around the brainwashing he’d been subjected to. There was no other explanation. Why would he shoot up his own smack? Why would he do it with a stranger? Why would he agree to go running off to a jazz club in the middle of the night when he had shit to do? Why would--

He stops as the door opens and suddenly he’s Holden Caulfield. The quiet, stagnant room becomes a rye field and he stands there watching a tall man in a rumpled suit slide into the room, ready to catch him.

_Ian._

That’s his name, Ian. He’d told him that, while they were drunk and blubbering, swerving back and forth across the road in their car like bees. He could see it in his head, like a little movie, Karen giggling as she chanted Ian’s name out the open window, singing him happy birthday. It wasn’t even his birthday.

It is anything but irrelevant.

Ian has blood smeared across his glaringly white shirt. Deep circles rest under his eyes like the lunar mare, a black bruise on his cheek. He smiles.

“Where’s my money?” Mickey asks quietly from the hallway between the bathroom and the main room. Ian slowly closes the door, glancing at Karen on the couch.

“See, that’s the issue,” he says, hopscotching wearily over strewn items of clothing.

“Gimme the money or you’re gonna be in serious shit, Gallagher, we don’t mess around.”

“Calm down, spit fire, I’ve got your money.” Ian shakes his head, stopping a foot in front of Mickey. The shadow of the hallway is the only thing between them. Ian reaches under his shirt for what Mickey assumes must be cash, but comes up with a six barrel revolver instead.

The mouth of the gun is cold against Mickey’s forehead. His gun isn’t in his pants.

“You’re trying to threaten me with my own gun?” Mickey asks spitefully, ignoring the impending doom in his gut as he stares at Ian’s wrist and his finger curled around the trigger.

Ian is completely and utterly calm; a blank canvas.

“Stating the obvious is redundant Mickey.”

“What do you want? Keep your fucking money, whatever, just stop pointing that shit where it doesn’t belong,” Mickey stammers, eager to swat Ian’s hand away, his heart racing.

“Listen,” Ian says, jumping all of a sudden, leaning down to stare at Mickey face to face. “I’m a _good_ man, true to my _word_. You’ll get your goddamned money--I just can’t have you running off all willy fucking nilly.”

“ _Willy fucking nilly_ , what are you eighty-five?” Mickey says with a roll of his eyes only to get the gun pushed harder into his skull. He can feel it leaving a mark, a planetary ring right between his eyes.

“Shut up, smart ass.” Mickey sees it; the look. It’s the way Ian’s face moves, just slightly, his eyes narrowing and his mouth twitching downwards and Mickey sees images of Satan.

And then it vanishes and Ian lets out a breath like a popped balloon. He pulls the gun away and jiggles it in Mickey’s face.

“You got more of these?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Mickey snarls, reaching forward and grabbing the gun out of Ian’s hand, hitting the safety as quick as he can so Ian doesn’t try to go for it and accidentally shoot both their brains out.

“How much are they worth?”

“What, you think I’m a Winn-Dixie Mart or something? You haven’t even paid for your first purchase; you’re not exactly on good credit _Mr. fucking Gallagher_.”

Ian runs a hand through his hair, looking exhausted and oblivious and for the first time he actually resembles a human being. He turns and opens the top drawer of the bureau, rifling through some of his clothing and yanking out a thick wad of cash, folded and wrapped in a rubber band. Mickey gawks as he realizes they’re all hundreds.

“Here,” Ian says, shoving the cash into Mickey’s hands like it’s candy and not a good ten grand.

“Jesus Christ.”

“You can just call me Ian,” he mumbles, and Mickey looks up at him to see the plastic animal smile on his face again.

Mickey ignores it and starts counting his reward. He no longer feels like Holden Caulfield. Ian is Jay Gatsby and can catch himself in his swimming pool.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mickeyslegs.tumblr.com


	3. Well, I Hope Your Ol' Plane Crashes

The morning sun beats down on Mickey’s face.

It boils his skin. It pools red and heats up and cauterizes. It festers at the base of his neck like a burner on low, dull and uncomfortable.

He feels like a cracked egg bubbling on the sidewalk as he closes the car door behind him and crosses the asphalt to the little service center next to the gas pumps.  

Ian Gallagher wants a candy bar.

Ian Gallagher wants a fucking PayDay and can’t go and get it himself because he doesn’t want to go into the goddamned Texaco. They make him uneasy, he says. They’re stuffy, he says.

“Fuck you and your fucking fear of gas stations,” Mickey mumbles, the door jingling as he pulls it open. The building has no air conditioning, only a small fan sitting in the corner, struggling to putter. Mickey feels the air push down on his shoulders, wrap around his throat, fill up his mouth like cotton. He grabs a PayDay off the rack, tosses it on the counter.

“Hey, couple of Good Lucks, will ya?” he says, nodding to the wall of cigarettes behind the girl at the register. She pops her bubblegum. He looks around distractedly as he pulls out his wallet. A rack of newspapers sits by his feet. He frowns, leans over to grab one.

“Gonna have to pay for that,” the girl says as she rings him up. Mickey doesn’t reply, staring at the cover. The advertisements hanging on the walls and the brand names littering the aisles suddenly don’t mean shit to him, he can barely see color.

Ian Gallagher’s face is plastered across the entire front page of the New York Times.

 

**_BONNIE AND CLYDE; BACK IN ACTION!_ **

_Alcatraz’s youngest prisoner, run off with a blond bombshell; what will he do next?_

_Ian Gallagher, age 18, was found missing from his cell August 9th, along with Karen Jackson, the young daughter of a guard living on the island. Master bankrobber and--_

“Hey, mister!”

Mickey jumps, looking up at the girl with her brassy curls and powder blue uniform. She pushes up her flamingo glasses and purses her lips.

“That’ll be a dollar fifty, thank you very much.” Her bubblegum pops.

Mickey glances back down to the paper before tucking it under his arm and digging two dollars out of his wallet, tossing them on the counter. He snatches up the candy bar and the cigarettes and slides out of the service station as fast as he can. The checkered floor and narrow aisles make him uneasy.

As he crosses the lot he makes the decision to shove the newspaper down the back of his pants attempting to process this information. The Chevy’s license plate is missing, long gone. Mickey wonders how he’d missed it.

Mickey hold his breath as he sinks into the passenger seat. The interior of the car is smokey and sullen, Ian leant over to look into the back seat, Karen sitting there with her elbows propped up on her knees, her face nestled between her hands. Ian whispers to her softly, melodic.

_“--dark and deep; But I have promises to keep; And miles to go before I sleep; And miles to go before I sleep.”_

The plastic seats are sticky and hot. Empty, hollow soda cans sit in the cup holders, the radio turned down to a low buzz, softly whispering.

“Jesus, that was beautiful, Ian,” Karen breathes low, speaking around her cigarette, completely engrossed. The two of them forget to acknowledge Mickey as he gets into the car. Light from outside the window catches the corner of Ian’s irises, his cracked lips turned up into a proud smile.

“Yeah, wrote it a couple days ago--”

They both turn towards Mickey as he slams the door, hard behind himself, the entire car jolting.   

“Frost,” Mickey says, tossing the candy bar into Ian’s lap and pulling open his pack of cigarettes. “Robert Frost wrote that, asshole. Would you just drive?”

Mickey lights his cigarette, sitting rigidly as he takes a drag and blows it out the window. There is a moment of hesitation, as if the three of them are preserved in amber before Ian quietly reaches for the shift and starts the car again. Mickey stares out the window and watches the rows of buildings pass in flying colors.

Nothing makes sense at all. This time the day before, Mickey was minding his business, folding laundry and tucking bags of heroin between cotton undershirts and floral patterned bedding. And now he sits in a car without license plates, next to one of the most wanted convicts in the United States, trying desperately to recall the night before, but every time he grasps at something, his fingers brushing the handle of the memory, it slips away. The car begins to feel as if it were filling up with water.

The fifteen minutes to the Laundromat are quiet. Everything feels wrong. Karen hums quietly to the music and hangs her head out the window like she’s a lap dog, her curls flowing behind her in waves of gold. Ian is silent, like a man made of steel, sitting behind the wheel, barely moving. His face says nothing and Mickey wonders if that’s what he looks like when he’s angry.

They pull into the parking lot behind the Laundromat at noon. The door to the office is hanging ajar and Ricky stands beside it, his foot propped up on the brick wall. Mickey jumps out as soon as the car stops.

“Where you been?” Ricky calls, the doors behind Mickey slamming as Ian and Karen get out.

“Doing business,” Mickey says, grabbing the door handle and sliding inside before Ricky can ask any more unwanted questions. None of it matters. He just wants these people off his back. Every time he looks at Ian Gallagher his skin crawls. He can feel the toxicity of Ian’s gaze, feel it like a micrometer of ricin slowly shutting down each tiny cell in his body, one by one.  

Mickey leads Ian and Karen into the basement, cardboard boxes lining the small room on every side. Mickey opens one up and pulls out a heavy duty plastic case.

“What’d you guys want?” He asks, opening the case on the floor, revealing several revolvers and a few rounds of bullets. “I got knives, I got handguns, I got heavy-duty firepower. Couple grenades somewhere.”

Ian peaks into the box against the wall, then looks down at the case on the floor. He’s ditched the blank look for something a little deeper. The smile on his face almost hides his eyes bleeding malevolence.

“Some of everything,” he says thoughtfully.

“Some of everything?” Mickey snorts. “That cash you gave me back at the hotel ain’t gonna cut it then.”

“There’s more where that came from.”

“Bull shit.”

“Yes, sir,” Karen pipes in from where she’s standing by the steps, looking like a doll. She fingers her skirt. “You tell him about our plan, Ian.”

Ian turns toward Mickey with a look of pure joy, and for a moment he really is a child.

“We’re hitting the Wells Fargo headquarters in a few days.”

“Hitting as in you’re beating up your old uncle Wells for sleeping with your mom or hitting as in bank robbery?”

“We’re only borrowing it,” Ian says with a grin, his mouth full of shark teeth. “Think of us as Robin Hood and Lady Marian.”

“Don’t they both die in the end?” Mickey asks, closing the case and standing up to look for the bigger guns.

“Everyone dies in the end,” Ian says, and he sounds almost romantic about it. Mickey shakes his head. “So we have a deal then? I gave you a sort of down payment and now I bring you the rest when we get it?"

Mickey pulls the AK-47 out of a canvas bag and holds it up. Ian makes him nauseous, but somehow Mickey trusts him. He trusts him with his life.

“Deal.”

Ian grins.

Mickey helps them bring two bags of firearms up to Ian’s truck, packing them in like grocery bags. Ian shakes Mickey’s hand formally. Karen climbs into the passenger side, Ian sliding around the front end towards the driver’s side.

“Hey, Mickey,” he says, the vehicle between them like a trench on a battlefield. Mickey looks at him expectantly. “We could always use a third pair of hands.”

“What, you want me to come with you?”

“Burglary isn’t easy my friend.” He smiles. He smiles that beautiful smile, and it’s better than Ricky’s. It’s magnificent, and Mickey swears he’s Adonis in a human’s body.

Ian Gallagher is a convicted felon wanted for resisting, eluding, and obstruction, on top of his previous charges, which are god knows what. His face is everywhere, in every paper, on every television, every street corner, as omnipresent as oxygen. He vibrates with insanity, spouting illogical tirades of nothingness. Looking at him makes Mickey feel sick and liberated all at once.

There is no reason to help them rob the biggest bank in San Francisco.

“Okay,” he says.

“That’s right.” Ian grins. “Tuesday, eight a.m.--meet us at the hotel.” He starts the engine, Buddy Holly on the radio.

_“You say you’re gonna leave, you know it’s a lie.”_

“Yeah,” Mickey says, nodding as Ian pulls out.

_“‘Cause that’ll be the da-a-ay.. when I die!”_

Holly would die in fifteen months. He would be twenty two years old; a child, forever. The slow spinning of a plane turbine in the cold February wind somewhere, nowhere in Iowa, three bodies tossed face down in the snow, the echo of the words “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!” floating around in their empty, lifeless heads and on the howl of the wind as it blows flakes like drifting, wary travelers, miles to go before they sleep.

Mickey watches the Chevy drive away and wonders how the man sitting in that car, the man who is afraid of gas stations and verbally plagiarizes world famous poets, could have simultaneously been the youngest person to enter and to escape from the highest security prison in America. Ian Gallagher is no man, he is a child, like Holly, bound to be forever young.

Maybe it’s just hard for Mickey to remember that he’s still a child too.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the filler. next chapter will be highly eventful.
> 
> Buddy Holly song: That'll Be The Day   
> Robert Frost poem: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening
> 
> mickeyslegs.tumblr.com


	4. Out, Damned Spot

The car pulls into the back lot, the sun glinting off the mirrors like the blinking eyes of Argos. Mickey catches his own warped reflection in the shiny paint of the passenger door, watching his face ripple obscenely, contorting into a malevolent expression that makes him wonder if the car has some sort of revealing mythical true-self powers of enchantment. 

It’s Tuesday. Ian Gallagher—child, convict, bank robber—sits behind the wheel, his face somewhere between serene and ecstatic. He catches Mickey’s gaze in the middle of an animated conversation with Karen Jackson, where she waves her hands around like small birds and speaks with her mouth open wide.

Mickey rises from his seat in the back exit doorway of the laundromat, flicking his cigarette aggressively and shoving his hands into his uniform pockets. The car slows and jerks as it halts, breaks whining like a disgusting toddler. Ian leaves the engine running as he opens the door and steps out.

“Morning!”

Mickey feels dirty at the sound of his voice, like Lady Macbeth with blood on her hands. It shimmies into the cracks and corners of his skin, sticking to him like lint and dust. When Ian speaks, he is the gladiator and the quiet mother, and Mickey is both a simple prisoner dueling for his freedom and a patient patron follower, a lamb of god.

“Get back in the damned car,” Mickey grumbles, stubbing out his cigarette on the brick building and stepping towards the car. Miss Jackson smiles at him from her side of the window.

“You have an awful temper, Mr. Milkovich,” Ian says, ducking back into the car as Mickey climbs into the back seat.

“Fuck you,” he mumbles, slamming the door behind him. The back seat is littered with plastic wrappers and greasy food bags. Mickey has to pick up an empty Coca-Cola bottle and a newspaper to sit down, tossing them aside, the bottle tumbling to the floor and the newspaper flopping on the seat beside him, it’s pages falling open.

“So, we park precisely seven blocks away from the building and snuggle up, all waiting and suffering and such until ten o’clock—” Ian is saying but Mickey isn’t listening to him, glancing at the newspaper. A small picture and paragraph story in the corner has a red marker circle around it. Mickey squints, fishing the paper from the seat. “—goes on break for cigarettes and the other one is switching out with another bank teller, so their security should be compromised to the fullest extent—” The picture is of a familiar woman, all big smiles and dark beautiful hair. Mickey reads the small blip of story, a careful recount of the missing woman’s name and who to contact if found. “—no one will be around, absolutely deserted. I bet if we even ask nicely they might just hand it over without no such fuss at all—” Mickey frowns, reaching out into the void to recover some memory or another, where this woman spoke to him or ran into him or whispered in his ear, but there is nothing. She is a small ghost in one dusty corner of his mind. He tosses the paper aside. “—can’t wait to show you. It’s this heavenly thing, god, everything runs through you all at once, Jesus, it’s beautiful.”

“You’re not making any sense, baby,” Karen says, looking up at Ian Gallagher from the passenger seat. They are sitting so close to him, but Ian seems so terribly far away, on some pelagic journey, lost somewhere between philosophical breakthroughs and out of body experiences.

“Just you wait, just you wait, you’ll get it,” he says, glancing at Mickey in the rearview mirror as he turns out of the parking lot. You’ll get it. It.

IT.  

***

They sit seven blocks away from Wells Fargo, parked under an underpass. Ian has the canvas bag of guns underneath his seat and rotationally removes each one, shines it carefully with a handkerchief and places it back, picking up the next. He whistles as he shines, tapping his foot, glancing at his wristwatch every other second. Karen falls asleep after fifteen minutes, curled up in the seat, her pretty pink lips opened slightly, and the thin gossamer skin of her eyelashes, spider webbed with blue veins, fluttering fleetingly like dove wings.

Mickey keeps glancing at the newspaper, itchy.

“Hey, why’d you circle this, you seen this girl?” He asks, snatching it up and holding it out to Ian. Ian places the gun he’s holding gently on the dashboard, and turns to peer at the newspaper.

“Mmn, Karen did that,” he mumbles. Mickey looks at his face, searches through layers of masks for untruthfulness and finds nothing but innocence.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

Ian turns back to the guns. Mickey meets his eyes in the rear view mirror again and there’s something there, for a split second, before it’s gone, Ian’s eyes flicking back down to the pistol he’s shining.

It’s quiet again and Mickey sits back, listening to the mumble of the radio and Ian’s handkerchief squeaking occasionally on a gun that he’s already shined twice. These two people, two people he barely knows, two people who are liabilities, have sucked him into this mess like a black hole and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t really want to think about it.

Maybe he’s just lonely.

People move by on the sidewalk, faceless in their corporate loyalties, ghost-like in their rush. Ten o’clock creeps up on them, Ian glancing at his wrist again and again until the big hand lands on the ten and suddenly he’s jumping up in his seat.

“We’re gonna be late!” He shouts, reaching over to tap Karen’s cheek. She blinks, sitting up, Ian placing a gun in her lap.

And then they’re all piling out of the car, their guns stuffed under their shirts, Ian’s hat low on his head. Mickey looks down at himself and thinks he probably looks more like a criminal than they do, in his dirty, bleach stained uniform. Karen’s curled hair bounces on her shoulders, her gun tucked in her handbag.

“This is the only time I’m doing this with you,” Mickey says out of the blue, defensively.

“Sure,” Ian says with a smile, Karen’s arm laced with his.

Everything boils as they walk, Wells Fargo sitting there, mocking them on the corner. Something bubbles up in Mickey’s throat and he doesn’t know if it’s excitement or fear or anger; all he can do is hang on to it and let it propel him forward blindly.

They approach the bank like a normal, if not odd looking group, Ian reaching out to open the glass door. The sun hits their back madly.

The room is square and spacious and empty, just as Ian had said it would be, sparsely decorated with potted plants and picture frames. Only one man stands at the counter. The single lonesome teller looks exhausted. She hands the man an envelope; he thanks her and moves away, vacating the path between the three of them and the teller. The room feels like a growing circus balloon.

Ian glances at Karen and she heads for the teller confidently. Mickey realizes then that Karen and Ian have a plan that they hadn’t bothered to tell him. He swallows bitterly, watching Karen’s hips sway as she walks up to the tired woman.

“Hello, miss. I have a gun in my purse, please step away from the counter. If you press the security button my friends will most definitely shoot you,” Karen says with a smile. The inflated balloon feeling pops as everyone takes a step back to examine the situation as if they were an omnipresent observer and not a player in the game. The teller woman’s eyes go wide and she raises her dainty little gloved hands, stepping backwards. The man with the envelope stops in his tracks.

“Hands behind your head?” Ian asks politely as he tugs the pistol out from his jacket. The man obeys like a puppet on strings. “Good, down on the ground now, please.” Ian waves the pistol looseley. The man lays down on the ground.

Karen has now followed the woman behind the counter to the safe in the back. Mickey can’t see her anymore. He doesn’t like this, doesn’t like the theater performance. He doesn’t like knowing exactly what comes next. Everything feels deflated.

The door jingles behind him.

All things fall apart, suddenly and perfectly, happening in quick procession like a movie reel.

The woman stepping into the bank has her nose in her purse as she shoulders through the glass doors and Ian turns on her as she looks up, the gun raised, point blank at her baby face. She shrieks, dropping her purse, spilling its plastic contents across the floor like confetti, or multicolored human remains.

“Hey, don’t hurt her,”—the man on the floor. “I said not to fucking move”—Ian, with the gun.

“I’m—“

In the winter, when you’re fingers are so cold that they burn with flame when you touch them, a polarity that is unexplainable, one thing being true and the opposite playing forth like a little drummer boy.

And so is the sound of the gunshot—so loud that it is somehow quiet, somehow unattainable to Mickey’s ears.

The man jerks rather undramatically, a thin spray of blood blanketing the white floor and white wall behind him and then he is still, the bullet hole between his eyes weeping over his lashes just as the woman at the door begins to weep, her tears holy water, the man’s made of blood.

The world moves in slow motion now. Mickey hears the blood in his ears as he stares disbelievingly at the back of Ian’s head.

“Aw man,” Ian whispers, and Mickey can see his fingers shaking. “Aw, man, why’d you gotta make me do that, huh?” He huffs a sigh and drops one hand from the raised gun to wipe his sweaty palm on his slacks. The woman cries. “Shut up,” Ian mumbles, turning towards her, waving the gun wildly as if it were a newspaper or a hat and not a Smith and Wesson Model 12. “Shut up! I can’t think, Jesus Christ, what’s a fella gotta do to get some peace and quiet around here?”

The woman clamps her jaw real tight, her lip quivering as she stares at the mouth of the gun. Ian shakes his head and turns to Mickey, who stands there breathing heavy.

He looks like a lion in a glass menagerie. His mouth is turned down in irritation but his eyes are alight with power, domination, as if he were Atlas with the world upon his great, godly back. He meets Mickey’s gaze and smiles, smiles just enough to make Mickey’s lungs cease.

“Ian? What…”

They both turn to see Karen standing there in the doorway comically, holding two large bags at her sides.

“Change of plans, sweetheart, we gotta skedaddle.”

Karen looks between Ian, Mickey, and the dead man on the floor and swallows. For one brief moment Mickey sees the little girl he’d seen the night they had taken heroin, spread out on the bed like Marilyn. She’d looked so incredibly small. And then it’s gone and she’s nodding, her kitty heels clicking as she heads towards them.

Ian grabs one of the heavy bags from her arms, Mickey taking the other, and the three of them step past the woman at the door, barely holding herself together. People up and down the street are gawking, trying to get a good look in the direction they’d heard the gun go off. A pair of tourists stand in the street, the man holding up a camera. His mouth opens in a silent ‘o’ as he reflexively snaps a picture of all three of them.

The world speeds up again. Ian curses. They run.

Screaming, shrieking, broken cries.

“Help! Help! For the love of god, help!”

A woman wails and police sirens also wail, the midday sun beating down on their backs in their wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I's been so long!  
> Okay so, I've realized that everyone might not actually get every single literary/mythology reference I make so:
> 
> Argos- A Greek giant with 100 eyes who was often called 'Panoptes' which means 'all-seeing'  
> Atlas- A Greek Titan who held up the Earth (and the rest of the solar system, I think) in it's place in the stars  
> Lady Macbeth- In Shakespeare's Macbeth, she kills someone and, although she cleans her hands, she becomes transfixed with getting the blood off of them as if the it were still there. That's also where the 'out damned spot' comes from (she says it as she tries to clean her hands).
> 
> More updates soon!  
> mickeyslegs.tumblr.com


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